


that which was put asunder

by cyan96



Category: Dominion (TV), Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Archangels, Case Fic, Gen, Identity Reveal, Linda martin deserves a raise for having to deal with Lucifer's familial bullshit, Twins, collision course celestial trainwrecks, crossover and fusions, dysfunctional sibling relationships, lucifer season 2 canon divergence, mythology and worldbuilding, plagues of egypt, stopping and starting the apocalypse 101
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2020-01-15
Packaged: 2020-05-01 19:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19184347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyan96/pseuds/cyan96
Summary: "Michael," the man answered, in response to the unspoken question. "And yes, he should."Chloe took out her notepad. "And the message?"There was a long moment when Michael didn't speak. He just blinked twice. It was a languid gesture, bird-like, and the otherwise only movement made as he stood in an almost unnatural stillness. He was looking at her with an acute intensity, but for some reason it didn't really seem he was seeing her at all.Then, abruptly, he closed his eyes."Tell him —" he paused. The eyes flicked open, dark and quiet, and for some abstract reason, despite his expression not having changed at all, very tired. "Tell him to be wary of Gabriel for me."He didn't offer anything else.  Chloe's pen hovered over her notepad, suddenly a hundred percent sure that this wasn't a date-call for one of Lucifer's favours.(Michael is in Los Angelos trying to stop a minor apocalypse; Gabriel is in town trying to kickstart a major one. Eons since Lucifer has last seen either of the twins, and it seems more's changed than stayed the same.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Not As They Were](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11118180) by [Sassaphrass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sassaphrass/pseuds/Sassaphrass). 



> 1\. Since I'm pretty sure it's mostly Lucifer fans reading this: Michael and Gabriel are non-identical twins, currently estranged due to conflicting worldviews. Michael wishes to protect humanity, Gabriel has lost faith in them after his adopted son was murdered in a fit of jealousy. Their ideologies were basically switched the last time Lucifer saw them. 
> 
> 2\. This is set in season 2, and diverges from Lucifer 2.14, approximately. Charlotte is still the Goddess, Linda is a celestial insider, Chloe is not. Some of the relationships may mirror season 3+ however.

It took three days for the hospital to discharge Chloe after Carslie, and another five spent bundled up at home being hovered over before the precinct finally cleared her of medical leave. By the end of it Chloe was feeling almost hunted. Mainly because Maze, of all people, had decided to take upon herself the dubious task of nursemaid. It was a sentiment Chloe appreciated — and was very touched by!— but in practice consisted mainly of charcoaled toast and being force-fed copious amounts of soup, thankfully provided by Dan and not Maze's ethically unreliable culinary talents.

Day one out of the hospital and Chloe was already itching to go back to work. Day three and Maze had hidden all her casefiles God knows where. She also made sure Chloe was swaddled in bed like an absolute invalid, an action Trixie and Dan both outrageously agreed with, Dan especially saying: "look, maybe you should just focus on healing for a few days, 'kay Chloe? No work." And Chloe understood his worry, but she was also going legitimately stir crazy.

"T's what you get for nearly having your guts boiled Decker," Maze told her blithely, peeling apples with a stiletto knife the length of Chloe's arm. "And for healing like a human slug."

"Thanks," said Chloe.

Maze gave a slightly patronizing nod of her head, as if acknowledging Chloe's sincere apology for healing like a normal person instead of thinly veiled sarcasm. "No problem. I got raisin rum from Linda, kinda like a get-well soon gift. You want?"

"I can have alcohol but not a sandwich?"  

Maze just raised an eyebrow. "Doc said liquids only, Decker."

By the time her leave cleared Chloe was filled with fervent desperation. It was like the first few weeks of Maze's extremely intense girl-bonding cohabitation all over again, except for how this time Chloe literally could not get away. She felt kind of bad about it the morning of, though. Trixie made all three of them breakfast sandwiches, and Maze managed not to burn the coffee to paint thinner, which were culinary accomplishments neither had managed a week before. They both watched intensely as Chloe took the first bite and made all the appropriate "yum yum," noises. Maze leaned back in her chair, heels propped up on the kitchen table, arms crossed with satisfaction, and nodded at Trixie's wide beaming face. "I taught her that," she said, and then allowed generously, "with help from your ex."

"I only burned the egg twice before I got it right, mommy," Trixie confided.

Then she grinned at Maze and raised her hand for a fist-bump, face smeared with chocolate milk, eyes bright and bushy-tailed. It was good to see her like this again, especially after the sad origami expression of her worry, present for the majority duration of Chloe's bedreset, hospital and Maze-reinforced both.  There was apparently just something about Chloe's weirdo room-mate that cheered her up like nothing else.

In the light of that, Chloe felt kind of ungrateful trying to get away so desperately from said room-mate. She smiled a bit into her sandwich. "Thanks, Maze," she said, after praising Trixie for the perfect Hawaian bread—only slightly crispy.

Maze rolled her eyes. "Whatever Decker."

Still, when all was said and done, it was a relief to be back at work.

Chloe sent Trixie off to her school-bus with hugs and kisses and lunch, barely managed to save the breakfast dishes from going out the window via Maze, and then started the car and went off to the precinct through the early LA traffic. It really _was_ good to be back to work again; antsy barely covered her state the past week, stuck with doing absolutely nothing. More time with Trixie was always cherished and welcome, but for the most part it'd just been well, Maze, and bed, and bad television, and nothing to occupy herself apart from the giant blaring knot of worry.

At the red-light, Chloe gave in to the near-compulsive itch plaguing her since the hospital, and checked her phone for the fifth time this morning.

Still nothing from Lucifer.

She put her phone away. She breathed out, a long, thin exhale with her hands clenched on the steering wheel. 

Still nothing _on_ Lucifer either. No trace. No hair. No emptied whiskey bottle or armani-clad sighting. Not even a stupidly inappropriate voicemail. Just like the entirety of the last week since Carlslie; Lucifer Morningstar, disappeared into thin air, as if he'd walked out of her hospital room and then LA entirely.

Maze had said he was fine, when Chloe had tore back after finding Lux all closed up. So had Amenadiel. And Linda, sounding worried but saying if he'd left it was likely of his own volition. She'd sent him about three hundred voicemails by now and near double that in texts, none of them answered. She'd called everyone and half of everyone had called her. And the end result was still zilch. Exactly nobody had seen even the shadow of Lucifer since shortly after he'd delivered the antidote.

And this was still the state of current events.

In light of that, the case the lieutenant handed Chloe was a welcome distraction.

*

The crime scene was smack dab in the middle of a block of popular eateries, and considering LA, the number of reporters and just plain onlookers was intense. "Chloe! Welcome back, girl!" Ella collared her in an one-arm hug when she stepped through the yellow perimeter tape, a tiny whirlwind of camera and blue latex gloves. "Hey, you got any news on Lucifer?"

She took one look at Chloe's face and said, "Guess not, then. Aww man."

"Linda and Maze say he's probably fine." Chloe tried for a smile. Judging by Ella's expression, she figured she was still stuck with a grimace. "It'd be nice to have confirmation, though."

Ella nodded. "I know right? What happened to you guys— it was— _intense_. But man, just going off the grid like that? Not cool. We should be getting together you know? Talking things out, to help the healing." She made an expansive gesture as she spoke, and then went in for another hug. "Like this. I bet Lucifer could use some hugs. He was finally getting the hang of them, too!"

Chloe considered Lucifer's usual startled opossum reaction whenever Ella or Trixie trapped him in a tiny-framed embrace, and snorted. "I bet he was," she said, even as Ella let go and beamed at her.

"There's the Chloe we know and love."

Chloe smiled back. "That's --Thanks Ella." And then, because she was already on this train already: "For everything. I heard from Dan about the — cars."

Or at least, the vaguely illegal and career threatening adventure they'd gone on to get Chloe's equally illegal antidote ingredient.

Ella raised an eyebrow. "What are friends for? No wait, don't answer that. Awesome, that's what." Cheerfully, she bumped Chloe's elbow. "Lucifer did most of the work, anyways."

Chloe's smile wavered a touch. "Yeah."

"Uh. You know what friends are also great for? _Forensic deductions,_ " Ella said hurriedly. "Which, this case by the way? Is a _complete doozy_." She paused. "Like, actually. I'm talking yoga-massacre levels, but less stabbing. Wanna see the dead body Decker? Come on, dead body."

She herded Chloe towards the corpse. It was so much like something Maze would say and do, or even Lucifer: _now let's see who's the delightful dead chap this time, shan't we, Detective,_ that Chloe found a laugh startled out of her again.

She had good friends.

And Ella had to be missing Lucifer too. And Chloe had a life that wasn't Lucifer, and a case that definitely wasn't Lucifer, with a dead man and what she was pretty sure was a sobbing wife in the background.

 _Focus, Decker,_  she reminded herself.

Not everything was Lucifer. Not most things, even. Chloe had a job right now that deserved her attention. A friend as well. Ella was still looking at her a little anxiously. Chloe squared her shoulders, slammed the remaining disobedient worries of _Lucifer_ into a locker like week-old laundry into the spinner, and turned to Ella with her work face on. 

"I'm good, Ella. Have we ID-ed the vic yet?"

The answer was yes. 

Victor Mallow. Age  55. Owner of the restaurant they were standing in front of. White, balding, and apparently, dead of asphyxiation — "But not the strangling kind!" Ella reported with a raised finger, "the allergy kind." The weird thing was that he also may have died from internal bleeding, or otherwise internal organ boiling; the bleeding from eyes and mouth gave Chloe a pretty unwanted flashback to a week ago. According to Ella  they didn't match the bleed patterns from poisoning so much as haemorrgic fever however, like Marburg's or Ebola, and also...

"Wait there's more?"

"Oh yeah. See these marks over here? Measles. Except this guy is old enough that if he's still up and kicking, it's not 'cuz he got vaccinated so much as he already got the measles as a kid and should be immune now."

Chloe stared at the dead guy. "Well, that's insane."

"I know right? I'm not a disease expert though, so autopsy results'll give you a better gauge. Bet the coroner's gonna have a field day," she said happily.

Chloe considered the dead guy and thought so too, but in the opposite direction of what Ella was likely imagining.

She interviewed the wife and the collection of anxious chefs in the vic's restaurant, testing for suspects and motive. Marllow did indeed have a severe allergy to shellfish, which Chloe noted, but a diligent search of the kitchen found exactly no trace of seafood at all, let alone oyster. Mallow was also apparently a hard-ass on his workers. Chloe poked that route and found everyone in the employee section with an alibi, apart from the wife, who had no motive, and who was sobbing seizorously into a decanter. It took fifteen minutes for Chloe to extract herself with soothing gestures. She left with a list of names from rivaling restaurant feuds and the niggling knowledge that really, no one in the restaurant had a background for the disease-mash-pot weirdness anyways.

She was halfway to opening the door of her cruiser when someone called her name.

"Detective Chloe Decker?"

Through the din of LA traffic and police work the voice wasn't particularly loud, but there was a cool solemn authority behind it that made Chloe look up. A man looked back. He was unfamiliar, but striding towards her through the throng. Chloe profiled him on reflex. 6'2. Caucaisian. Tall but lean instead of broad, with fine black hair, and a long black coat, and combat boots.

"Yes?" said Chloe, and mentally ticked through the witnesses, wondering if she’d missed one.

She was halfway down the list when the man softly stated: "You work with Lucifer."

He stopped a few feet shy of her. His voice was deep, his accent British.

So. Not case-related.

Considering Chloe had been trying to forget about Lucifer in favour of the case, this was not the most welcome distraction. It also wasn't entirely unexpected. Lucifer seemed to have a way of bulldozing into her life no matter what, even if he himself was God-knows where and determined to give her an anxiety attack from worry.

"I do, yeah. Were you looking for him?" She half expected the answer even as she asked. Everyone was looking for Lucifer. No one knew where he was.

The man paused.

There was a moment in which he visibly considered his response where Chloe had a second of hopeful possibility: that Lucifer had sent him instead of the other way around, _finally,_ after a week of absolutely nothing. But then he said, slowly: "Yes and no. I was actually wondering if you could pass on a message for me, Detective."

The hope went flat. Internally, Chloe berated herself.

"Ah."

"It's a delicate matter," he added, low and soft. "I would be indebted."

He was going to be asking Lucifer for a favour, then. Maybe favours of another kind too, but going by the Stewardess case _delicate_ wasn't the word to describe Lucifer's sexual relations. Even if this guy was pretty enough for it. Chloe looked him over again, this time critically. Pouty lips, fair skin, sooty lashes. A burgeon of annoyance was niggling in her chest, this stranger coming up to her to contact Lucifer for him during an active investigation when _she_ couldn't contact Lucifer, but — no.

It was over very quickly. It wasn't fair of her. He'd been nothing but polite so far, and it made sense why someone would be trying to find Lucifer through Chloe, now that his regular channels had gone radio silent. His work at the precinct wasn't exactly a secret. 

"Not sure how much help I can be," Chloe told the guy, determined to not let Lucifer influence any more of her judgement when he wasn't even in the room. "I haven't seen him since last week. No one has."

"If you could get it to him when he gets back, then. Again, I would be in your debt, Detective Decker."

Chloe frowned a little. It was the second time he'd repeated that. _Indebted._

The guy didn't sound desperate. If anything, his tone was perfectly even, cool and measured, but — well, he'd tracked her down in the middle of an active investigation. Quite abruptly, Chloe wondered if this wasn't just for a favour after all. Either that or her reputation preceded her; it wasn't as if she was going to refuse him, perfectly polite normal person seeking her to pass on a single message, but he might _think_ she would.

"That's fine," Chloe said firmly. Half reassuring him and half to herself. So she was known as a hardass, okay, that was fine too.  "I'll give it to him when—" not if, "he comes back. Does he have any way to contact you..?"

"Michael," the guy answered, in response to the unspoken question. "And yes, he should."

Chloe took out her notepad. "And the message?"

There was a really long moment when Michael didn't speak. He just blinked twice. It was a languid gesture, bird-like, and the otherwise only movement made as he stood in an almost unnatural stillness. He was looking at her with a focused intensity, but for some reason it didn't really seem he was seeing her at all.

Then, abruptly, he closed his eyes.

"Tell him —" he paused. The eyes flicked open, dark and quiet, and for some abstract reason, despite his expression not having changed at all, very tired. "Tell him to be wary of Gabriel for me."

He didn't offer anything else.  Chloe's pen hovered over her notepad, suddenly a hundred percent sure that this wasn't a date-call for one of Lucifer's favours.

"... Is that all?"

A small and very wry smile touched the corner of Michael's mouth. "Yes. Thank you for your time, detective."

And Chloe had the sudden flash of recognition borne from a hundred interviews: he was going to leave right now. Right after dropping that quiet ominous shell of a warning.

The words were leaping from her mouth before she could stop them: "Who's Gabriel?" 

Because that _was_ a warning. And all the bottled-up worry she had for Lucifer was flooding back now, like a sequence of dominoes toppling: What if _this_ was why Lucifer had vanished into thin air, what if the warning had come too late, _what if,_ and Chloe was lowering her notepad and clutching her standard issue office pen in her hand hard enough to divet.

Michael's gaze, already wandering as he pivoted on his heel, went back to her. "Pardon?"

"Lucifer. He's missing. Could this Gabriel have had something to do with it?"

"Missing?" Michael paused. His eyebrows flicked up a marginal degree. "No. That's... unlikely. To be Gabriel. Luce is... not exactly prone to doing anything on anyone else's volition. If he's gone, it's more likely a result of his own capriciousness."

In order, Chloe's cop-brain noted: the nickname, the question-mark on the _missing,_  and then the last two sentences: basically what Amenadiel and Linda and Maze had all told her with varying degrees of sympathy, or in Maze's case just pure unadulterated rage.

"Right," she said.

Then it wasn't the cop-brain on the steering wheel anymore. A feeling like a chasm of gaping irritation yawned in her chest, and yes, likely it was the week spent in too-close proximity to her room-mate, but all of a sudden she was suddenly much more understanding of Maze's reaction.

If Lucifer really had just decided to ditch everyone — ditch _her_ — on a whim, she too would have been tempted to somewhat inappropriate forms of stress relief.

"Right." Chloe repeated. She grappled grimly with herself. This was not the time. She was still on a case, she was in the middle of — "I'll give him the message. Thanks," she told Michael, stuffing down the wave of irritation.

She stuck her pen into the notebook spirals a tad harder than it warranted, and then looked up to find him — abruptly focused again, gaze quietly intent like the edge of a knife.

For a moment, all the background noise faded. Chloe had the strangest and completely inexplicable sensation of being caught in a vacuum.

It was a feeling she'd later chalk up as a delayed hangover from Carlsie's poison, nothing but a split second where her brain whispered there was just something _off_ about the man in front of her, looking into eyes as dark and still as a starless night in the middle of campsite nowhere. Then Michael gave a very slight huff, and Chloe found herself blinking.

"He can make some truly questionable decisions. Lucifer. It's.. a precedence." The touch of a smile lifted his mouth again. "But he does wish the best for people. And from what I have heard, if there is one thing on this earth he immovably cares for, it would be you, Chloe Decker."

Before she could rack up an appropriate response to that, Michael turned on his heel with the slightest of nods.

"Thank you for your time, Detective."

The crowd swallowed him up while Chloe was still blinking, nothing but a snap of a long black coat vanishing into the sea of LA morning commute. For another, inexplicable beat, she simply stood there, arrested. Then noise and traffic filtered back through. Chloe shook her head. Maybe Dan had been right: she _should_ have stayed home another day. She didn't feel tired, but nothing else explained the strange gap in her attention.

Chloe glanced down at the note. It still read like the kind of vague warning that should have been shunted into an evidence drawer had Lucifer disappearance's been an actual case. After a moment, she fished out her phone and took a picture of it. The likelihood of forgetting its five word content was low, let alone losing her investigations notebook, but she was meticulous by nature. It didn't take half a second, anyway.

Back up. Let it never be said Chloe Decker took chances. 

Because this guy — Michael— knew Lucifer. Not in the peripherals of favours or sex or raunchy parties either; he seemed to really know Lucifer. Like Maze or Amenadiel or Linda, between the nickname and the way he'd given the exact same behavioral description as the former three. From what Chloe knew of Lucifer's background, he... didn't have many emotionally close connections. It seemed important to get this message to Lucifer, then, when he came back. And he _was_ coming back.


	2. Chapter 2

Of course, when Lucifer finally reappeared two weeks after disappearing into thin air, it was with cheerfully callous disregard and a blonde bimbo on his arm.

Chloe didn't even know why she was so surprised. It was exactly as everyone with working insight into Lucifer's thoughtless head had told her: he was right as rain, he was perfectly fine, he had left because he'd wanted to — a whimsical careless jaunt. What had Chloe even expected? That he'd been victim of a meticulously orchestrated kidnapping? No. He'd just blown off everyone in his life —including _her_ —to go to Vegas and get married to a skank, and she was so furious the message was literally the last thing on her mind.

That the past week had been basically a simmering pot of frustration did not help. The Mallow case had hit a series of investigative dead ends. All the suspects had either iron-wrought albis or, upon further investigation, were without motive, and definitely without means. When it landed on Chloe's desk, preliminary autopsy had said cause of death had been _fever._

That was what apparently happened when the human body became breeding ground to a sudden dozen of extremely deadly diseases at once, at least half of them either not found anywhere in North America or genuinely extinct — including a strain of the plague. The ratcheting of bodily temperatures had been a defense mechanism, the report said. It'd just boiled the brain along the way. The report also said the amalgamation of virus and bacterium was completely impossible, this was unlike anything the coroner had seen outside of pulp fiction, _what the fuck Decker, seriously where did you find this guy,_ which was basically on par with Chloe's life, these days.

She'd done a crawl for anyone in microbiology with access to the bacterium and viruses found. The list was slim, and mostly outside of LA, and entirely without connection to the deceased.  There were no leads. Dead ends did not usually frustrate Chloe, but the means of death was perplexing and insane, and her attention that week had been pulled two ways.

Lucifer had still been missing. Chloe had worried, even though she tried not to. Then Lucifer came back, Candy on his arm, and the worry translated straight to outrage.

Point was, between Mallow and Lucifer and Candy and the new Ash case, the message was literally the last thought on Chloe's list of to-dos. It remained there until Ash's death was solved and Lucifer divorced, and the complete autopsy for Mallow's death landed on Chloe's desk in a two-inch vanilla folder.

There was a little purple sticky note on the folder. It read: _Still completely insane, Decker. Good luck finding whoever did this. Guy's mad genius and possibly made a deal with the devil, if you know what I mean._

It was mid-afternoon and Chloe had just finished the last of the paperwork for the Ash case. Lucifer, eating pudding, peered over her shoulder.

His face lit.

"Well, yes, genius and the devil _is_ a fine mix, if I say so myself." He peeled off the sticky note and inspected it for a beat, before its connotations hit him. "Detective!" His expression was half-way to scandalized. "Did you happen upon a charming little homicide without me?"

"You were in Vegas," said Chloe.

Lucifer faltered a bit. "Yes, but, I already explained — "

"And this case isn't charming so much as it's insane," Chloe finished.

Things were, more or less, back to normal between them. Chloe had even come to like Candy, in the end, which was moot point because Lucifer had divorced her after a week of marriage. There wasn't much for Lucifer to explain. It was ultimately Chloe's own fault, really, for thinking— in what now seemed to be a poison-induced pique—that romance was feasible between them. Lucifer was a great partner and one of her best friends, no doubt about that, but they were just too different in their personalities.

"It's good that you're here now, though," she added, at his slightly plaintive look. "This case needs a new perspective."

The plaintive look melted to smug pleasure. "Well, I am _excellent_ at introducing people to new perspectives." Lucifer adjusted his cuff-links. "The sexual kind, mostly, but if needs must."

He went back to his pudding, expression expectant. Chloe rolled her eyes at him. Secretly, she tucked away a smile.

It was good to have him back.

Hauling the entire box of Mallow's investigative notes onto her desk took a minute. Chloe had more loose folders tucked neatly in her cabinets, and she organized them into a coherent timeline while Lucifer sat on her desk and read through the preliminaries. Occasionally he made an offhand comment, such as: "Ms. Lopez suspected it was death by allergens? Bloody karmic for a restaurant owner," between bites of pudding.

The last piece Chloe pulled out from the depths of her cabinets was her investigations notebook. It was her old one, if a week out of date was old. She'd gotten a new notebook just in time for the Ash case; its predecessor had filled up with Mallow's death. When she flipped it open, the paper came automatically to a twice dog-eared page.  

The page was near blank, ruled in blue ink, and held a single sentence.

Staring at it, Chloe's first thought was: _whoops._  

Remembrance was abrupt. Tall thin man. Dark quiet eyes. A message. It was hard not to remember, when the message Chloe was supposed to deliver stared her in the face.

For a brief blank moment, she wondered if Lucifer had already gotten word, considering he'd been back in town for nearly a week and a half. This was followed again by:  _whoops_ , because Lucifer had been in town for a week and a half, and Chloe had _completely_ forgotten.

She specifically remembered tallying this task underneath the mental column titled _important._

Next time, she'd tally it someplace physical.

"Hey, Lucifer?" Chloe said slowly.

He tilted his head at her, smiling. "Yes, darling?"

Still slow, she said: "At the beginning of Mallow's case. While you were away. There was this guy who wanted to contact you."

Her tone must have given something up; he looked at her in puzzlement. "The local build-up for my devilish attention where I was gone, yes? I'm working through the backlog now." And then, in apparent realization: "Oh, dreadfully sorry for anyone who accosted you while you were investigating, Detective," he said earnestly, before saying, in just as earnest menacement: "just point me their way and I'll happily make sure they _never—_

" _Lucifer._ "

Chloe glared at him. He blinked back at her.

There was a brief moment where she wondered if _this_ was why the guy had been so deferentially polite, before she sighed. "They were perfectly nice. And it sounded important. You might have already gotten it, considering you've been back so long." She flipped open the notebook for him. "It's from — he said his name was Michael—"

"Dreadful name, that."

"— And he told you to be wary of a Gabriel."

Chloe saw it because she was looking for it. Lucifer's shoulders tensed; the hand he had on his pudding spoon stilled. His gaze went focused, and unblinking.

_So it was a warning after all--_

And then he shook his head once and reapplied himself to his pudding with a snort.

"Well, that's charmingly ambiguous," he said, round his spoon. "Which tosser decided to leave that message?"

"A Michael." Chloe frowned at him. The tension had evaporated out of Lucifer like it'd never been present in the first place. "He didn't leave a last name, so I thought you'd recognize him by the message. He seemed like he knew you," she added, because it was why this entire thing had seemed so important in the first place. But Lucifer only gave a dismissive wave.

"I know quite of few Michaels, Detective. Do you understand how many humans carry that bloody name? Why you lot seem so determined to name your offspring after _him_ I'll never understand." His voice was curving with distaste by the end, though, and Chloe knew Lucifer well enough to know what _that_ meant.

"So you know a Michael."

"Yes. A few. Didn't I just say so?"

"You know a Michael _personally."_

"The original, I'm afraid," said Lucifer, scowling now. "And I think when you say personally you mean bloody _unfortunately._ And Gabriel too of course, I can already see you asking. Plenty of humans named after him as well." He paused, and then, grudgingly: "I suppose if you _must_ choose from among the celestial choir, it's not an altogether awful choice. Gabe's alright, among that lot."

Sometimes talking to Lucifer was like having to direct a unicycle while conducting a five-ball juggling act.

"So you know a Michael _and_ a Gabriel." said Chloe. "Personally."

Lucifer nodded with annoyance. "Yes yes. Wings and halos and all, although if anyone actually _deserves_ a halo, it's probably Gabriel. They're quite pervasive in your culture, you know. The goody-two shoes twins — although you never get the _twin_ part right." He tossed the empty pudding cup into the trash can. Chloe watched him chuck his spoon after it in a perfect arc, then admit:

"You actually had me a tad apprehensive for a second there, you know, in the beginning." He tugged at his lapels. "What with Mum and Amenadiel and..." A pause. Lucifer's features twisted. "Well, point is, another sibling visit from the feathered side of the bloody family wouldn't have been too much of a surprise."

It took a moment for Chloe to catch the physical implications beyond all the metaphor.

And then her previous train of thought — _of course Lucifer would say he knew the actual biblical archangels_ — swerved two lanes, skidded, and crashed firmly in—

"Are you telling me you have brothers called Michael and Gabriel?" She said incredulously.

On the heel of that thought came another. "Wait. Are they like— Amenadiel?"

Lucifer gave her a scandalized look.

"Rather _not_ like Amenadiel, Detective. I couldn't bear the thought of any more older siblings. Amenadiel and Raphael are enough for any Devil, thank you, those anal-retentive pricks." He adjusted his cuff-links, miffed. "No, Michael and Gabe are younger."

That was not what Chloe had been asking. What she'd been asking was more along the lines of: _biologically related?????_ with exactly that many question marks attached. The three faces that'd lined up abruptly in her mind's eye view— Lucifer, Amenadiel, Michael— bore no resemblance to one another whatsoever. And then Chloe registered the other part of what'd exited Lucifer's mouth.

"You have a brother named Raphael."

"Sister, actually."

"You have brothers called _Michael_ and _Gabriel."_

"The twins, yes. Are you quite alright detective? You're usually not this... repetitive."

His stared at her, perplexed; Chloe stared back.

Like anyone who'd ever spent any time in Lucifer's extended presence, Chloe had, on more than several occasions, wondered exactly what kind of upbringing could have made Lucifer, well, _Lucifer_. A year and a half of partnership later, her big picture still came up as a jigsaw puzzle missing most of its pieces.

She didn't pry. He obviously didn't want to talk about it, but tidbits still slipped between the cracks, over time and cases. His father was difficult and demanding and estranged. Once, in a time of need, his mother had abandoned him. He was from old money. He worked in biblical metaphor. He had had a difficult childhood, which now made him fashion himself after the devil — Amenadiel's rendition of things. And upon reflection, of course Lucifer had siblings named Michael and Gabriel and Raphael, of course; the more Chloe learned about Lucifer, the more Lucifer made sense.

Right.

She decided not to think about Lucifer's amorphous family tree. It would likely give her a headache.

It was already giving her a headache. Chloe sighed. "Nevermind." And there was still the original question she'd been trying to lead Lucifer into, which, now knowing Lucifer had an actual brother named Michael, came out as the even more reasonable: "Right. So why can't this Michael," she waved her notepad. "Be your brother Michael?"

It made a weird amount of sense, even if the note itself transformed into something more sinister.

But Lucifer only said, dismissive, like Chloe was being the absurd one: "Because, darling, Michael coming to warn me of Gabriel is like _Maze_ becoming a bloody _nursemaid_. It might happen, but only in an alternate universe where irrational numbers are divisible and my Dad is Morgan Freeman." He leaned over, picking up a case-file, attention already half-way diverted.

"People don't get _warned_ about Gabriel. That's not how it works; _he's_ not the one with the temper of hurricane Katrina and the destructive capacity of the Flood. And I mean that quite literally, by the way. You humans never get that part right either. Gabriel warns people of Michael, if they require the warning. Father's little soldier boy, Michael, always going above and beyond." For a second his voice shaded, bitter, before it bounced back to a scoff. "Anyways, my point, darling. Michael doesn't warn people about _Gabriel —_ the very notion's absurd—and certainly not to me."

He said it with such confidence that for a moment, Chloe doubted herself.

Alright. So maybe the guy had called Lucifer a nickname. And maybe he had pinned Lucifer's behavior like a thread through the eye of a needle. But this was Lucifer's family, and Chloe didn’t actually know much about Lucifer's family. Lucifer himself was fanning out the crime scene photos like the conversation was already over. He regarded her with he corners of his mouth curling upwards, eyebrows wagging. 

"Now, how about we focus on the delightful little homicide you found when I was —"

He stopped.

Chloe glanced down. She thought: _huh._

And didn’t manage to follow it up with _gotchu_ because with a wrench that sounded like the desk sliding back Lucifer’s hands were suddenly on her shoulders, gripping and feverishly tight. “Lucifer—?” she said, blankly.  When she jerked her sightline up the expression on his face was one she’d only glimpsed after— getting herself poisoned, desperate and furious and above all frightened, demanding: “ _Did he hurt you?_ He didn’t hurt you did he? That sodding — “

_“Lucifer._ What are you— ?”

_ “Michael.”  _

“No,” Chloe said blankly. “No he was perfectly nice. Lucifer, calm down.”

“— Because I’m about to rip his fucking liver out if he _dared_ — wait. Sorry darling. My ears malfunctioned. Perfectly what now?” 

“Nice,” Chloe repeated. 

Now it was Lucifer’s turn to look baffled. 

“Then what’s he—” He stopped abruptly. He trailed off. His grip on her shoulders loosed, slipped. Chloe couldn’t even appreciate his apparent spleechlessness —(no one in the station ever thought they’d see the day)— not when he looked so flounderingly bewildered. Lucifer’s attention was sweeping back down, to the desk. Chloe’s followed it. 

To the photo in the corner, half curling against her keyboard’s edge.

It was a preliminary shot, likely taken by a beat cop before Chloe had arrived at the scene: dreary morning skies, the concrete LA cityscape hanging the background. In it, reporters and civilians were milling around Mallow's body face-down on the sidewalk, only half-cordoned off by stretches yellow tape. The crowd was a swell of sardines in a can. The image quality wasn’t great.

Michael was still unmistakable where he stood at the edge of the white chalk outline, face caught in three-quarters profile, expression drawn in a frown. He looked as Chloe remembered him: tall, thin, and tired, dressed in a long black coat.

Lucifer stared at his brother’s face, marble still. His bingers braced against the laminate plastic of the photo. All the savagery of earlier was gone from his expression.  It was just white now, lips thin and eyes locked. 

After a long long beat, he said, voice gone raspingly quiet:

"Detective, my apologies. I— need to go."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the joke in this chapter is that Maze indeed-- last chapter--played the equivalent of nursemaid despite Chloe's 99 protests.


	3. Chapter 3

“Lucifer, if you need to talk about it— “ the detective was saying.

“A thousand apologies darling,” he said again, halfway to the door already. “But urgent needs must. I cannot _believe_ he’s— well, I can. _Obviously._ Gotta vamoosh,” and he slammed out into the precinct parking lot and hit the gas.

His voice was strangely dry but he was too enormously distracted to notice it. The first call to his mother’s cell went straight to voicemail, which was rather unfortunate, considering circumstances. Lucifer couldn't even multi-task. Amenadiel's capacity to hear prayers had gone the wayside along with his wings, which slammed the door on _that_ bit of instantaneous communication.  LA traffic was a bloody nightmare this time of day, worse than Hell’s waiting line after that mess in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You couldn’t see past the car in front, let alone drive.

Lucifer slammed the horn, stuck his head out the side of his corvette, and roared in a voice ringing with five separate harmonics: **"** ** _out of my way."_ **

The lane in front cleared with darling efficiency. He gassed the pedal and hit re-dial at the same time. 

This time, thank bloody hell, it connected. "Lucifer?" mum's voice was a touch peeved, but she didn’t know what was going on; he didn’t begrudge her it. "Son, you know I'm in the middle of—" 

"Right, I have bad news and more bad news, but don't panic. You call Amenadiel, I'll get Maze, we _may_ need a bomb shelter, but LA has plenty of those. Personally, I never saw the mortal appeal until now, funny enough, and—" he realized abruptly that he was _rambling,_ like one of those twitchy door-to-door salesmen who couldn't make themselves get to the point, and cut himself off: "Michael's in town."

It took a moment. When it finally came, mum’s voice was small. "... Michael?" 

And Lucifer had a moment of sudden feeling for her. It was a strange, alien urge to— comfort her, to reassure her that everything was going to be alright. Even if she was terrible, and he hadn't forgiven her at all, and things were _highly_ unlikely going to be alright. For her.

Before he could find the appropriate words to communicate the sensation though, she had to go and demand —thus proving that she was unquestionably in the clutches of late-onset insanity— with breathless _anticipation_ of all things: "Michael? he's here? Have you seen him? Tell him not to move an inch, I'll be _right there."_

For a moment all Lucifer could do was stare blankly at the open lane in front of him. His grip crimped the steering wheel.

"He's not bloody here for a _family reunion,_ mother!"

"You don't know that—" there were noises in the background, presumably that of an deluded woman shoving together an equally deluded go-bag. "I haven't seen him in a literal _eon_ , Lucifer."

Oh, for goodness sake. "Yes! Since he brow-beat you to be carted down to Hell. Which if you haven't noticed, mum, you're on a one-way choo-choo trip to again, if he finds you! And this decidedly isn't going to be like— “ _Uriel._

He stopped. The name caught in his throat like a wad of tight tissue, a sharp ugly ache in his breast where his wings used to pull, mid-lift. "Look. Point is, we're not about to accidentally win against _him_ , of all the bloody pricks who could've showed, especially considering Amenadiel's decided to go shedding pigeon!"

Which was why father had to have sent Michael in the first place, the bastard. Lucifer really should have expected it. It wasn't like Dad to to renege on a deal, and just because Uriel's murderous undertaking had been self-imposed didn't mean an official messenger wouldn't eventually get sent, to swoop Mum and possibly also himself back to Hell.  

You couldn't get more official than Michael. He’d done the deed the first time around, after all. _All_ the bloody deeds.

The only acceptable part of this was that he wasn’t here for Chloe. That had been — a transformative sort of rage and fear and icy blankness, when he’d seen Michael’s face in the spread of crime-scene photos. He’d _spoken to Chloe._ He’d seen her. He knew of her existence. Between Mum and Uriel and Amenadiel, unfortunate precedence dictated an unhappily linear relationship between the family who knew _of_ Chloe and the ones who’ve tried to kill her. It was almost a perfect one to one ratio.

And Lucifer might’ve taken _(killed_ ) Uriel in a fight, but he hadn’t managed Michael the first time around, even before the wings came off.

If he’d _dared_ hurt Chloe, Lucifer would’ve gone and ripped his sodding liver out, obviously. And gotten booted straight back to Hell in the aftermath, but not before he got enough hits in for Michael to smart for the next century. But Michael hadn’t hurt Chloe. He’d only given a bollocks warning— something ridiculous about Gabriel— the detective likely hadn’t heard correctly, sometimes she did that, adorably, like with her denial of the whole “devil” thing. Michael was never sent to issue _warnings_ (and certainly not of Gabriel.) That was Amenadiel's job. Or Gabe’s, if Father was feeling particularly benevolent. No, Michael was deployed only after all the warnings had been issued and ignored, and Father decided to press the big red X of annihilation.

He was the bomb and the fallout. And Chloe was still whole and speaking, her wide beautiful face so baffled. So — Michael wasn’t here for her, and Lucifer could almost thank Bastard Father for that.

Except that meant he was here for Mum. And Lucifer.

The former having clearly swan dived into insanity, no help from that end at all, she kept repeating over the phone-line: “We’ll _talk it out._ I’ve been watching instructional videos on the Internet contraption the ants have made, apparently they recommend communication with their offspring!” which was completely delusional. Reasoning with Michael on one of Dad’s missions was akin to reasoning with a brick wall. “And Michael’s always been— I’m not repeating _Uriel,” s_ he said abruptly, fiercely.

 _Michael’s not Uriel._ He thought about retorting. _No one’s going to manage killing him, sodding accidentally or otherwise._

But he couldn’t. The words tasted like sulfur and Hell’s absurdly dusted ash, it was almost nauseous to think about. It was never a scenario he’d _had_ to think about before, had ever considered before— the plebeian mortal act of dying applied any of his siblings— even Michael. Especially Michael.

But Uriel had been wiped off the face of existence, and Azrael’s blade was still stuck behind a brick in Lucifer’s flat.

Suddenly, it became very difficult to hold on to his vexation at mum’s attempted— reasoning.

“Oh for Hells’s sake,” he said wearily. “Just— call Amenadiel.” Maybe big brother dearest could talk some sense into her head. “I’ll fill Maze in and we’ll meet up at the club. But for the love of bloody fuck Mum,” he added, “ _please_ don’t look for Michael on your lonesome.”

Lucifer clicked the end-call button, jammed the accelerator up to a far more reasonable 120 miles per hour, and dialed Maze.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello my lovelies! i am back. And embarking on an experiment. The experiment mainly being this fic, which in the interest of its contiunance, will be now updated every time I finish a scene. This is in direct contrast to another epic of the same length I have planned, which is going to be updated only after I finish the fic entire. We'll see which idea works better in practice lol. In any case, this means this fic will have slightly wonky chapter lengths, and there'll likely be revising as I go. But hopefully updates will be more regular.


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